The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the NAEP, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card — is the only nationally representative assessment of student achievement in the United States. It has been administered since 1969. And for every one of those fifty-seven years, it has documented the same result: Black students score significantly below white students in reading and mathematics at every grade level tested. The gap persists across income levels. It persists across regions. It persists across decades of reform, billions of dollars in spending, and an entire industry of consultants, programs, and initiatives designed to close it. The establishment has concluded, with the weary certainty of people who have stopped looking for answers, that this gap is a permanent feature of American education — a structural inevitability that can be managed but never eliminated. They are wrong. And the proof that they are wrong is not theoretical. It is operational. It exists in specific schools, in specific cities, producing specific results that demolish the assumption of inevitability with the only evidence that matters: children who were told they could not are doing what the establishment says is impossible.
I am going to name these schools. I am going to cite their data. I am going to document what they do differently. And then I am going to ask the question that every parent, every politician, and every civil rights leader should be asking: if these schools can close the gap, why can’t the rest? The answer is not flattering to the establishment. It is not supposed to be.
Success Academy: Harlem’s Inconvenient Truth
Success Academy Charter Schools were founded in 2006 by Eva Moskowitz in Harlem, New York City. The network now operates 53 schools serving approximately 20,000 students. The student body is 93 percent Black and Hispanic. More than 75 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. These are the same demographics that produce the worst outcomes in the traditional public schools located, in many cases, in the same buildings.
The results are not marginal. They are seismic. On the 2023 New York State Mathematics Assessment, Success Academy students scored in the top one percent of all schools in New York State — outperforming not just their geographic peers, but the wealthiest districts in the state, including Scarsdale, Bronxville, and Great Neck. In English Language Arts, Success Academy students outperformed the state average by more than 30 percentage points. The achievement gap between Success Academy’s Black students and the statewide average for white students is not merely closed. In mathematics, it is reversed.
Read those sentences again. Black children from Harlem, from families earning below the poverty line, are outscoring white children from the wealthiest suburbs in New York. They are not closing the gap. They are erasing it. They are proving, with the unanswerable authority of data, that the gap is not a function of race, or income, or zip code, or anything immutable about the children themselves. It is a function of what happens inside the school. And what happens inside Success Academy is fundamentally different from what happens in the traditional public schools that serve the same community.
The Common Elements
Success Academy is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. Across the country, a network of schools serving majority-Black and Hispanic students from low-income families are producing results that the traditional system says are impossible. They differ in geography, in organizational structure, in specific curriculum. But they share a set of characteristics so consistent that they constitute a blueprint — a documented, replicable formula for closing the achievement gap wherever adults have the will to implement it.
Extended Learning Time
Success Academy, KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Noble Network, and the Ron Clark Academy all operate on extended school days and, in most cases, extended school years. The typical Success Academy school day runs from 7:45 AM to 3:45 PM, with additional enrichment and tutoring available afterward. KIPP schools traditionally operate from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM, with mandatory Saturday sessions and a three-week summer session. The math is straightforward: students who spend more time learning learn more. The traditional public school calendar — 180 days, six hours per day — was designed for an agrarian economy. Gap-closing schools have replaced it with a schedule designed for academic mastery.
High Behavioral Expectations
Every gap-closing school enforces a strict behavioral code. Not because the educators are authoritarian, but because they understand what the research confirms: learning cannot occur in chaos. At Success Academy, students are expected to track the speaker with their eyes, sit in ready position, transition silently between activities, and follow instructions the first time they are given. At the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, the “55 Essential Rules” govern everything from classroom behavior to how students greet adults. At Noble Network schools in Chicago, a merit/demerit system provides immediate, consistent consequences for behavioral choices.
The progressive critique of these practices is that they are culturally insensitive, that they impose “white norms” on students of color, that strict behavioral expectations are a form of oppression. The results say otherwise. The students in these schools are not oppressed. They are achieving at levels that their critics say are impossible. And they are doing it in environments where the expectation of self-discipline is treated not as a cultural imposition but as a form of respect — because expecting a child to control themselves is an expression of belief in their capacity to do so.
Teacher Quality Over Teacher Certification
The gap-closing schools hire differently. They do not rely on teacher certification as a proxy for teacher quality, because the correlation between the two is weak at best. What they select for is the ability to produce results — measured by student learning gains, observed through rigorous classroom evaluation, and maintained through a culture of continuous improvement that traditional public schools have never implemented at scale.
Doug Lemov, the managing director of Uncommon Schools, spent years studying the specific, observable techniques used by the most effective teachers of low-income students. His book Teach Like a Champion (2010, revised 2015 and 2021) documents forty-nine discrete teaching techniques — with names like “Cold Call,” “No Opt Out,” “Right Is Right,” and “100 Percent” — that produce measurably higher engagement and achievement. These techniques are not theoretical. They are filmed, cataloged, and trained. Every teacher at Uncommon Schools, and increasingly at other gap-closing networks, learns them and is observed implementing them.
The contrast with the traditional public school system is stark. In most American school districts, teacher evaluation is functionally meaningless — 98 percent of teachers receive “satisfactory” or higher ratings, regardless of student outcomes. Tenure, once granted after as few as three years, makes dismissal for poor performance nearly impossible. The system protects adults. The gap-closing schools protect children. The difference in results is the difference in priorities.
Data-Driven Instruction
Gap-closing schools test frequently — not to sort children, but to diagnose precisely where each child’s understanding breaks down and to adjust instruction in real time. At Success Academy, interim assessments occur every six weeks, and teachers analyze the results question by question, student by student, reteaching concepts that were not mastered before moving on. At KIPP, data meetings are a weekly ritual, with teachers presenting student work and developing targeted intervention plans.
This is not “teaching to the test.” It is the educational equivalent of evidence-based medicine: diagnosing the problem accurately before prescribing the treatment. The traditional public school system, by contrast, administers a single standardized test at the end of the year — too late to help the child, useful only for producing the data that confirms the gap the system has decided is inevitable.
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Ron Clark is a former North Carolina Teacher of the Year who moved to Harlem in 1999, took over a class of fifth-graders that had been through seven teachers in one year, and by the end of the year had them scoring twenty points above the district average. He founded the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta in 2007 as a demonstration school — a place where visiting educators could see, in real time, what high-expectation teaching looks like with the students the system has written off.
The Ron Clark Academy’s student body is 90 percent Black, drawn primarily from low-income families in the Atlanta metro area. The school’s results are extraordinary by any measure. Standardized test scores consistently exceed the state average, and in many subjects exceed the national average. But the numbers alone do not capture what makes the school different. What makes it different is culture.
Students at the Ron Clark Academy are expected to look adults in the eye, shake hands firmly, speak in complete sentences, and hold doors for visitors. They are expected to work hard, fail gracefully, try again, and celebrate each other’s successes. The school has slides between floors and a DJ booth in the cafeteria, but the joy is built on a foundation of relentless academic demand. The students love the school because the school demands their best and celebrates when they deliver it. The progressive critique that strict expectations are joyless is refuted every day by the children at Ron Clark, who produce both the highest test scores and the highest energy in the city.
The CREDO Evidence
The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University has conducted the most rigorous large-scale studies of charter school performance in the United States. Their methodology compares charter school students with “virtual twins” — demographically identical students in nearby traditional public schools — to isolate the impact of the school itself.
CREDO’s 2023 national analysis found that students in urban charter schools gained, on average, the equivalent of 16 additional days of learning in reading and 6 additional days in math per year compared to their traditional public school counterparts. For Black students in poverty, the gains were significantly larger. At the top-performing charter networks — Success Academy, KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, Noble Network — the gains were measured not in days but in years of additional learning over a student’s career.
This is not ideological data. This is Stanford University research, using the most rigorous methodology available, confirming that the schools with the highest expectations for Black children are producing the highest outcomes for Black children. And the schools with the lowest expectations — the schools that have replaced rigor with relevance, discipline with understanding, assessment with affirmation — are producing the lowest outcomes. The correlation is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. It is, in the language of social science, robust.
What the Gap-Closing Schools Do NOT Have
It is worth documenting what these schools do not do, because the absence is as instructive as the presence.
They do not have lower expectations. They do not group students by perceived ability and provide different levels of rigor. They teach to the top and scaffold up, rather than teaching to the bottom and hoping for the best.
They do not have “culturally responsive mathematics.” They teach mathematics — the same mathematics taught at Exeter and Stuyvesant and every school that produces high achievers. The notion that Black children need a different kind of math, a math filtered through a cultural lens, is the soft bigotry of low expectations applied to the one discipline where objectivity is absolute. Two plus two is four in every culture on earth. The gap-closing schools teach it as such.
They do not replace academics with social-emotional learning. The progressive push to replace instructional time with SEL curricula — mindfulness exercises, emotional check-ins, identity affirmation — has consumed hours of the school day in traditional public schools without producing any documented improvement in academic outcomes. The gap-closing schools do not ignore the emotional lives of their students. But they understand that the greatest source of self-esteem is competence, and that competence comes from instruction, not affirmation.
They do not practice grade inflation. A student who has not mastered the material does not receive a passing grade. A student who has not met the standard does not advance. The gap-closing schools treat grades as information, not comfort. And the students, knowing that the grades mean something, treat the work with corresponding seriousness.
The Political Opposition
Here is the fact that transforms the achievement gap from an educational problem into a moral scandal: the schools that are closing the gap are fought, actively and consistently, by the same institutions and organizations that claim to care about Black children.
The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — the two largest teachers’ unions in the country — have spent hundreds of millions of dollars opposing charter school expansion. They have lobbied for caps on the number of charter schools permitted in each state. They have funded campaigns against ballot measures that would have allowed more families to access gap-closing schools. In New York City, the UFT and allied politicians have fought to deny Success Academy co-location space in public school buildings — effectively trying to shut down the schools that are producing the best results for Black children in the state.
The NAACP passed a resolution in 2016 calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion — even as its own members, in survey after survey, indicated support for school choice. The organization that was founded to advance Black people called for the restriction of the schools that are advancing Black children. Why? Because the unions that oppose charter schools are among the NAACP’s largest institutional donors. Follow the money. It always explains what the rhetoric cannot.
And here is the cruelest detail: the politicians and union leaders who oppose charter school expansion for Black children send their own children to private schools. The data on this is documented and devastating. Members of Congress who vote against school choice legislation disproportionately educate their own children in private or selective public schools. They have already chosen. What they are fighting to prevent is other parents — poorer parents, Blacker parents — from making the same choice.
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Doug Lemov’s contribution deserves its own accounting, because it addresses the most common objection to the gap-closing schools: that they depend on exceptional, irreplaceable leaders. Escalante was one man. Collins was one woman. Clark is one teacher. What happens when they leave?
Lemov’s answer is that great teaching is not a gift. It is a skill. And skills can be trained. His Teach Like a Champion methodology breaks effective teaching into discrete, observable, practicable techniques. “Cold Call” ensures that every student is engaged, not just the volunteers. “No Opt Out” means that a student who says “I don’t know” is not allowed to retreat into silence — the teacher provides scaffolding, and the student produces the answer. “Right Is Right” means that partial answers are not celebrated as correct — the standard is mastery, and anything less is a work in progress. “100 Percent” means that compliance with behavioral expectations is universal, not aspirational.
These techniques are not intuitive. They must be learned, practiced, and refined. But they are learnable — by any teacher, in any school, with any population. The gap-closing schools have proven this at scale. Uncommon Schools operates 56 schools in three states. KIPP operates 275 schools in 21 states. Success Academy operates 53 schools in New York. The techniques work when they are implemented with fidelity. The question is never whether they work. The question is whether the existing system will permit their implementation.
The Verdict of the Evidence
The evidence is not ambiguous. It is not mixed. It is not complicated. It is clear, consistent, and damning.
Where expectations are high, the achievement gap closes. Where expectations drop, the achievement gap persists. This is not a correlation. It is a causal relationship, documented across dozens of schools, hundreds of thousands of students, and decades of data. The schools that refuse to lower the bar produce Black students who clear it. The schools that lower the bar produce the data that justifies lowering it further.
Every school that closes the gap is proof that every school that does not close it is making a choice. Not a resource choice — Marva Collins closed the gap with $5,000. Not a demographic choice — Success Academy closes it with the same children who fail in the school next door. A choice about expectations. A choice about whether Black children can or cannot meet the same standard as everyone else. A choice about whether excellence is universal or demographic.
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Baldwin was writing about men. I am writing about children. Children who have everything to lose, and who are losing it, every day, in schools that have decided they cannot succeed. And the creation of that decision — the institutionalization of low expectations in the name of compassion, in the defense of adults at the expense of children, in the service of unions at the cost of futures — is the most dangerous thing this society is doing to Black America right now. More dangerous than any cop. More dangerous than any slur. Because it happens inside the building where we send Black children to become something, and they come out having been told, in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that something is too much to ask.
It is not too much to ask. Success Academy proved it. KIPP proved it. Uncommon Schools proved it. Noble Network proved it. Ron Clark proved it. Escalante proved it. Collins proved it. The proof is overwhelming, it is documented, and it is available to anyone who wants to see it.
The achievement gap is not a fact of nature. It is a fact of policy. And every policy can be changed — if the adults in the room care more about the children in front of them than about the institutions behind them. Every school that closes the gap is a testament to what is possible. Every school that does not is a monument to what is chosen. And the children trapped in those monuments are waiting for someone — anyone — to choose differently.